


until i'm in my grave v2

by theedas



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Gen, Human Trafficking, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, a eulogy to Jason Todd; may he get his act together, does this count as a bildungsroman?, that's part of the case fic, this is just a fic about me rhapsodizing about gotham folks dw it's all good here, yikes the tags are heavy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-05-08 06:16:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 17,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14688203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theedas/pseuds/theedas
Summary: Jason's got miles to go and one more life to live.Or: Reconciliation doesn't come easy, especially when it's with yourself.





	1. A Brief Epilogue

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [uiimg - DISCONT.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3365648) by [theedas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theedas/pseuds/theedas). 



> This is a revamp of my existing fic by the same name. I hope that you will excuse that and enjoy the changes I've made to the story.  
> Updates will be posted on Thursdays.

Two months ago, during the last quote unquote ‘Crisis’, Oracle had keyed him into the main frequency used to communicate with vigilantes in Gotham. She’d locked his access afterwards, but it had prompted him to look for his own backdoor into the channel. He clicks it on now, out of boredom, and maybe some partial desire to hear the chatter.

_“-ble at Fifth and Main.”_

_“There’s always trouble at Fifth and Main,”_ the voice of Dick Grayson curls, edged with laughter. _"I’m checking out something near Dixon Docks; would take me a while to get there.”_

 _“I know, Nightwing.”_ Even through the modulator, Oracle sounds fond.

 _“No flirting over the comms, you two,”_ Batgirl snickers. Black Bat hums an agreement.

 _“I’m in Robbinsville.”_ Drake says curtly. _“ETA 4 minutes.”_

 _“Switching over to private line for further briefing,”_ Oracle responds.

The line goes silent.

Jason whistles a tune to himself as he shoves his head into his helmet and goes looking for trouble.

He finds it in the form of one Timothy Jackson Drake, several blocks west of Fifth and Main, in a car lot outside a rowdy pub. There’s a flash of bright colour as Red Robin ducks to inspect the tires of a shiny blue Bugatti. As he straightens up, the other vigilante turns directly towards where Jason is kneeling at the corner of a nearby rooftop and waves.

Jason rolls his eyes and jumps down to meet him.

“Red Hood,” Drake nods.

“Red Robin,” Jason drawls. “You come here often?”

“Not by choice,” Drake snorts.  “Are you going to keep lurking, or will you make yourself useful for once?”

Jason places a hand on his chest, affronted. “I’m always useful,” he says.

“Right,” Tim replies. There's a curl at the corner of his mouth as he inclines his head at the car. “What are your thoughts?”

Jason grins back. “I've got a few,” he says. “You sure you want to hear them?”

“I think I could be convinced.” The curl edges into something closer to a full-fledged smile, one that neither of them ducks away from.

Progress.

And, possibly, the foundation of something more.

But we’re not there yet. No, Jason Todd, we’re not anywhere close. This is the closest you’ll get to a happy ending, but epilogues belie the chapters that come before; there are trials that you must face before you can claim your reward.

You’ll have to face demons and monsters and men-made-myths. You’ll see yourself at your worst and at your weakest as you are brought to your knees by despair, by pain, and by loss. You will find yourself lacking but you’ll also find those who can speak the truth, those whose pain outmatches your own, and those who are just as alone as you. Maybe, along the way, you’ll also find your way through the darkness. There is no torch to light your path and no string to guide you. Your endurance is the only thing that will sustain you. Your ambition is the only thing that will drive you. But these are not what will save you.

You, Jason Todd, came back wrong. But you will come to know what is right.

Until then, keep going. Don’t stop until you’re in your grave. Trust that the end of the road lies not in obscurity. Seek revenge, seek redemption, but know that rest will not be as easy to find.

You’ve got miles to go and one more life to live.


	2. Chapter One

The rain pisses down on Gotham, as it is wont to do in the middle of A-fucking-pril. May flowers and all that. But Gotham has been facing muggy weather since the beginning on February and the heat combined with early summer storms means that the city might be looking at major flooding at some point in the next month.

Jason considers this as he stares out the floor-to-ceiling windows of Robbins Tower’s thirtieth floor. This far removed from the people hustling below, he wonders if this is how Gotham’s elite become detached from their fellow citizens. Is physical distance all that’s needed to allow someone to view these issues as someone else’s problem? The reflection of the door behind him shifts and he hears the quiet click of heels on carpet as the aide who’d welcomed him in approaches.

“Ms. Kapoor will see you now,” she murmurs, bowing her head slightly.

Jason smiles tightly, slipping his knife back into the sleeve of his suit jacket. “Lead the way,” he says with an incline of his head.

He follows her into the boardroom, where the sharply dressed Eman Kapoor sits at the head of the u-shaped conference table. She rises as he enters and greets him in Urdu, smiling as he responds in kind.

“It is good to see you once more,” she says as he sits across from her. “Raya, please bring something for us to drink.”

The aide wastes no time in pouring out two cups of tea from the bronze set at the side of the room. It’s only after Kapoor takes a sip from her cup that Jason follows suit.

They spend some more time on pleasantries. Jason assesses the women as he waits for them to arrive at the real meaning of the meeting. Kapoor speaks with the slow, sneering drawl of a born and bred Gothamite but this itself gives away the fact that she isn’t one. Anyone worth anything in Gotham ditches the accent as soon as they can. There’s also the fact that their first meeting took place in a sweets shop in the outskirts of Lahore.

Kapoor is – was – one of the few teachers he hadn’t killed while training. Talia’s reach had allowed her to bring the core operations of her start-up to America but she’s a strong businesswoman in her own right. Her role on the senior executive team of Robbins Enterprise is solely due to her efforts; Talia doesn’t believe in giving out favours. The aide, Raya, is unfamiliar but Jason would bet that she’s highly trained. The lack of any bodyguards in the room is enough to key that off.

As the conversation winds down, Kapoor turns her own assessing glance at Jason. She taps lacquered nails against the wooden table once, twice. On the third tap, she narrows her eyes, considering.

“Are you still carrying on with that pet project of yours?” she asks, finally.

“It’s the only thing I do,” Jason replies dryly.

“Don’t be cute,” Kapoor rolls her eyes. “I don’t know why you busy yourself with that when you could be working comfortably with us.”

“A matter of preference, I’m sure.”

“Well, in any case,” Kapoor waves a hand, “in this case, it works out for the best.” She taps on the table again and the aide places a stack of papers on the desk. “This,” she says, pointing at the picture of a young girl on the top page, “is Lara Rajkoomar.”

Jason works his jaw as he studies the photo. She looks to be somewhere between six and eight, with curly hair cropped at the base of her neck, bright eyes, and a wide smile. She’s clutching onto the hand of a heavy-set man who looks equally as happy.

“Her father,” Kapoor says, indicating the man, “studies ways to lower aggression in soldiers with PTSD. He’s newly wealthy through his wife, but he’s been a supporter of the Mistress for many years. His daughter went missing five weeks ago.”

“Kidnapped?” Jason asks brusquely.

“It’s suspected,” Kapoor confirms. “But there’s been no ransom posted. We believe that she was taken by a group calling themselves the Liberators. They abduct young children and bring them to the States so that they ‘can have a better life.’ Once they’re here, they’re… well. You know how it goes.”

“I’ve encountered them before,” Jason scowls. “’Thought I wiped them out.”

“Rats multiply quickly.” Kapoor says, face twisting briefly with disgust before smoothing out. “All of the details that you’ll need are in that package. I’ve forwarded the digital copy to your account.”

“I,” Jason begins, “never said I’d-.”

Kapoor raises an eyebrow coolly. “Are you honestly trying to pretend that you won’t do it?”

He grins, rueful despite himself. “Guess not.”

They wrap things up quickly after that. Kapoor’s schedule blocked off the next two hours for a meeting with the executive staff which was sure to be fun. Rather than leaving through any of the main exits, Jason takes the elevator down to the lower level where he’d left a bike parked on a street adjacent to the building. Within minutes, he’s winding through the busy streets of the Diamond District. Half an hour later, he’s almost to the Sprang River when he glances behind him and takes a sharp right at the next corner.

He ditches the bike and clambers onto the roof of the complex, doubling back to the mouth of the alley. A minute or two later, a sleek silver car pulls up and two men step out. They speak briefly. One moves further in, the other slips his gun out from a back holster. He seems to be the more cautious of the two and has at least a little bit of some common sense, so Jason takes care of him first.

Wiping the blade of his knife with a cloth, Jason follows the other man, a burly Caucasian wearing a thin hoody and combat fatigues, as he ventures into forwards. He’s packing heat as well, though he’s less willing to pull out a gun in broad daylight. Amateurs. Jason waits ‘til the man rounds the corner and is no longer in street view before dropping down on top of him. His weight, combined with the force of the fall, brings the thug to his knees with a strangled shout. He follows through with the take down, pushing his head against the ground and snapping the man’s arms behind his back in one fluid movement.

“Why are you following me?” he demands. The grunt struggles wildly against the hold, swearing explicitly. Jason pulls the zip tie binding his wrists tighter. “This doesn’t have to be difficult,” he coaxes. “I just want some answers and then I’ll be on my merry way.”

“I’m not telling you anything,” Grunt snarls. He stills at the cool press of a muzzle against the back of his head.

“That’s not what I want to hear,” Jason says. “So, you’ll either tell me something useful, or I’ll let your corpse do the talking. You decide which it’ll be.”

Grunt lets out a soft whimper, but then steels his jaw. “You think I believe that? Everyone knows the Bats don’t ki-“

He voice is drowned out by the sharp noise of the gun firing then the sound of liquid splattering against asphalt as the man’s head recoils before slowly slumping downwards. White shards of bone glisten amidst the slowly spreading pool of red. As the ringing clears from his ears, Jason holsters his gun.

“Wrong choice,” he says to the silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wasn't planning on posting this today but i felt like i wanted to make up for the brevity of the epilogue


	3. Chapter Two

As the last rays of golden light flee the inky sky, Jason comes to a stop on the corner of an apartment building’s roof and surveys the scene before him. Despite the quickly approaching night, the area is brightly lit by the flames licking the side of an aged complex across the road. Despite the efforts of the firefighters on the street below, the fire was beginning to spread to the adjacent building. Its occupants were spilling from the ground floor, but already there were panicked screams from the levels above.

Jason snaps the seals of his helmet shut and engages the built-in air filtration unit. He takes a steadying breath, hearing it echo in his ears, and launches a line cross the street and onto the roof of the first building.

He discovers a man on the uppermost level, collapsed by the door to the roof. Smart thinking, but he likely hadn’t been quick enough. Working his way downwards from there, he finds a puppy whimpering and scratching at the door of one of the units, a woman with her head covered with a wet towel trying to head down the smoke-filled stairwell, and two kids sitting in their bathroom tub and crying. It’s quick work to get them down to safety but by the time he’s managed to clear the building, the second is in almost the same state of on-fire-ness. He curses under his breath and ignores the tightness in his chest so that he can keep pushing onwards.

The first few floors he checks are fine; the majority of occupants should have already been notified of the need to evacuate. By the time he gets to the fourth floor however, there’s a group of people huddled together on the balcony of one of the units. Two women are curved protectively around a tiny swaddled baby. Next to them, two teenagers and an old man who looks disapproving at their state of undress. Jason drops them down next to the first set of people but as he turns to head back into the building, a hand grasps onto the back of his jacket.

“Wait!” One of women looks up at him with wide eyes. “Is everyone else out?”

“If they got out, they’ll be on the street, with the paramedics,” Jason says, voice rasping through the modulator. “Is there someone you’re looking for?”

“No,” she replies, looking back at the woman tucking the straps of a respirator mask around the baby’s ear. “I have everyone I need. But there’s a couple on the floor below us – they’re really old and both of them have some mobility issues. I don’t know if they would have been able to get out quickly enough. I tried to find them earlier, but the stairs were blocked.”

Jason nods, fighting back a cough, and heads inside.

The third floor is filled with thick smoke, visibility low despite the emergency lighting strips illuminating the hallways. There’s no x-ray vision built in to the helmet, and even if he had thermal sensors, they wouldn’t be much help with the steadily increasing heat. Jason stays low and searches the first few apartments briskly. The last door is still locked, but light spills out from underneath the door. By the time he gets it open, his back is soaked with sweat underneath the jacket.

Over the muffled quiet, he can hear a soft whimper. A woman is sprawled face-down on the carpet, one hand outstretched to a wheelchair lying on its side. She stirs as Jason rushes to her side, wheezing as he examines her briefly for any signs of trauma.

“Are you hurt?” he asks. “Can I move you?”

“Xin… Xin giúp tôi,” she moans. She struggles to lift herself, arms shaking as she collapses. Her fingers stretch limply towards the wheelchair. “Xe lăn của tôi. Tôi không thể…”

Jason looks at the rusted chair, considering. It’s not heavy on its own, but it would be too bulky to evacuate the woman and the chair, especially seeing as they won’t be able to use the stairs to leave the building.

“Tôi không thể đưa bạn vào xe lăn,” he responds, hoping he’s saying what he thinks he’s saying. “Tôi sẽ phải mang bạn.”

She pauses, probably parsing through his uncertain pronunciation, then nods slowly.

Jason lifts her into a fireman’s carry and gets her out of the building as carefully as he can. As the paramedics carefully settle the tiny woman into a proper wheelchair, he kneels in front of her. “Chồng bạn ở… đâu?”

She looks at him carefully, eyes red from the smoke, and shakes her head. She takes in his stiffening posture and pulls one of his hands into her own.

“Thank you,” she says haltingly. “Please do not be angry.”

“He  _left you_ ,” he snarls, “to die alone.”

In a voice that rings with the echo of a million other iterations of the phrase, she says, with no hesitation or uncertainty, “This is Gotham.”

Perhaps that is justification enough.

She laughs hoarsely at his silence and pats his helmet. “I did not think someone would come,” she tells him. “Thank you.”

The EMS workers glance at him warily but chose to look away in favour of rolling the woman into the ambulance. As the sirens fade into the distance, Jason retreats to the safety of the rooftops and takes a minute to take off his helmet and breathe unfiltered air. Ash still floats in the air but now, without the flames as a backdrop, they seem to resemble snow more than a remnant of the events that had transpired. He shifts, feeling something vibrate at the side of his leg, and digs a hand into his pocket.

He pulls out a phone, the only thing the two thugs had been carrying on them. Hours before, there had been a text notification on the screen reading simply, “Make sure he doesn’t see you.” Now, the phone, which he had turned off while going on patrol, goes through its start-up process. Jason quirks an eyebrow at that and waits bemusedly for it to complete. Once the verification screen appears, another message pops up from a contact labelled R.S.

_Where are you??? You were supposed to be at BFY 20 min ago. New cargo coming in tonight. Need backup jic._

Then, a few seconds later:

_Why did you turn off your phone anyways? Yk boss can override remotely. Dtm you guys went for a drink w/o us._

Jason taps on the second message, frowning when the phone asks for a pin. He thinks back to the two idiots and taps in 1234. Unsurprisingly, it works.

The messages display in the phone’s SMS app. There isn’t much installed otherwise and a cursory inspection of the folders on the phone reveals that it’s fairly clean.  Tapping back to the messages, he scrolls up to see that the recent messages are the only ones in the chat. The only other text that has been received is the one that Jason had seen earlier, which is from a number simply listed as ‘Boss’.

Another message pops up on the screen.

_Are you seriously ignoring us rn? You’re on shaky ice already. Ffs just come already._

 

Jason purses his lips. In all likelihood, BFY refers to the Burnley freight yards. Cargo could refer to any number of things, but Jason thinks back to the discussion he’d had with Kapoor earlier that day and has a sinking suspicion that he knows exactly what it’ll be.


	4. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A heads up: This chapter deals with the topic of human trafficking, with a brief implication and/or reference to child slavery. It's one line in the second paragraph, said by an unnamed minor character who dies pretty quickly after. This is one of the more violent chapters so uh, warning for me struggling to describe gory fight scenes. Also like, brief body mutilation, kind of? Idk dude.

An hour later, he finds himself on a rooftop two miles southwest, overlooking the freight yard in question. There’s a group of men gathered on the ground below, chattering amongst themselves. Jason had considered moving in before the train arrived but had quickly dismissed the half-formed plan. If their transporters got to the yard and found their welcoming party missing, they might immediately move to get rid of any evidence. Dead kids don’t make profit but they don’t point to anything Gotham doesn’t already have within its borders. A new party wouldn’t be the automatic suspect in any following investigation.

No, Jason needs to be able to stomp this infestation out at the roots. He won’t risk the possibility of any of these sick fucks getting away with child slavery; if one survives, then there’s no way that they won’t try this again. In the past, he’d thought that he’d dealt with the problem by just killing Egon but obviously the merc had just been a middleman in the operation.

At least that’s what he tells himself.

The bug he’d placed before the men had arrived has been relaying their conversation ever since they started speaking and Jason had kept an ear on it while setting up his rifle. When the head of the group starts to talk about what exactly he would do if he could keep a ‘pet’ or two for himself, Jason’s carefully wrested calm disappears. He’s moving before he even realizes it.

The men scatter with startled shouts as he drops down into their midst. He launches himself towards the closest one, driving his elbow into the man’s throat, then kicking him solidly in the gut. As he crumples backwards, Jason spins towards another one and shoots him twice before he can even think to lift his gun.

The remaining men draw closer to their leader, darting for cover behind the freight cars to the end of the lot. Beneath his helmet, Jason’s lips peel back into a snarl and he launches himself up onto the top of one of the cars. Seeing their leader quivering in its shadow, he jumps down on top of him. Jason finds himself straddling the piece of filth with a knife in his hand that he doesn't remember drawing. He drives his knife into the one of the roach’s eye sockets and twists the blade as he pulls it out. Then, for good measure, he does it to the other eye. As the shitheel’s howls peter out, Jason stands and turns to the other three men. One of them steps back, crossing himself. He spins on his heels and tries to run, so Jason takes care of him first.

The two still alive stare at the dead men around them, then at each other. Both raise their guns. The first one’s hands are shaking, tears rolling down his cheeks, and his shots are wildly off target. “What do you want with us?” he demands. He’s a teenager, really, maybe seventeen years old tops, a kid recruited into another of Gotham’s wars. He could be handsome, if it weren’t for the fear warping his features. As a mercy, Jason slits his throat quickly and as painlessly as he can manage. As he folds, his partner shoots Jason from behind. The bullets slam into the Kevlar undersuit and Jason grits his teeth against the burst of pain and doesn’t let himself react to it. The man ducks around the corner of the caboose and Jason stalks forward.

It feels like there’s something under his skin, something other than pain and _hurt, hurt, hurtagainboyblunder._ It bubbles and expands and for a brief second, he pictures it boiling over until there’s nothing left inside him and he’s an empty husk of a man and a broken oath. _“To fight_ together _against crime and corruption-“_

He breathes. The moment passes. The anger stays. He goes the other way around the train car and finds the goon swearing under his breath as he attempts to reload with shaking fingers. Jason darts forward, getting close enough to swing a fist into the man's cheek that slams his head into the metal of the car. As it rebounds, Jason drives a knee into his stomach, then, as he curls inwards wheezing, grabs the henchman's arm and  _twists_ it behind his back. When he hears the crunching noise, he releases and the thug drops, screaming as though the wordless release of noise would make the pain go away. Jason knows from experience that it won’t, so he shoots him.

The guy he’d punched is the throat is stirring so he presses the muzzle of his gun to the man’s forehead. His eyes widen, and he opens his mouth – to scream or to plead, Jason doesn’t know. Doesn’t care. He pulls the trigger.

He cleans up after himself, because it pays to be neat and because he doesn’t want any loose ends from this op. The bodies dragged out of the way, where they’ll be found in a few hours whenever someone gets the courage to call the GCPD to investigate. Just as he’s finished moving the last corpse, the train pulls in. He’d thought that there would be more men, but only three come out from the front car. The men are visibly confused when they see the pools of blood and no bodies. Apprehensive, but stupidly less wary than they would have been had the bodies still been lying where they had died.

He kills them, one by one.

The last man screams when Jason appears before him where he’s isolated himself inside the car, screams as he dies, screams until he’s gargling his own blood and somehow still sobbing for mercy. Jason shoots him again just to make him shut up.

This time, he leaves the bodies where they are.

The train is long, but there are no people in the first five cars, nor the six after. It figures that the last one he tried would be the one he needed. As soon as he breaks the lock off the door and rolls it open, he hears the retort of a machine gun and dives out of the way. Its not fast enough to escape the bullet that lodges itself into his thigh. The opening spray seems to have been a lucky one however; the gunner just waves it back and forth, not even aiming solely at the corner where Jason had retreated. Because he has significantly better aim, and can actually use his head, his one shot is much more effective.

As the gunfire ceases and Jason stands, he allows himself one second to feel the pain blooming in his leg and stretching across his chest. He steps into the darkened car and shoots the asshole one more time for good measure and hisses out an unsteady breath through his teeth. The rage that’s been keeping him going pulses, as if to say, “Is that all?”

Then someone sobs, and he notices the kids.

The oldest looks fifteen, the youngest maybe five. They’re tiny and shackled to one another and, though not visibly malnourished, they’re obviously terrified.

He holsters his gun and limps towards them slowly. As a collective, they flinch, cowering against the wall of the freight car. The one crying grows louder. He realizes, abruptly, that they’re scared of _him._ He takes off his helmet and tries to smile reassuringly.

The children huddle closer together, wordless, wide-eyed, and shaking.

He can’t help the pang of self-directed hate, the feeling that there’s something wrong with him because Robin could do this, Robin did this. _He_ was Robin and he did this.

But obviously, he’s not Robin and he can’t do this, so he stops smiling.

“Are you okay?” he asks instead, and his voice comes out dry and crackling, even without the speaker of his helmet to distort it. He swallows and repeats the phrase in as many languages as he knows it in. With each repetition, they seem to shrink further into himself until one of the girls starts with recognition when he begins to speak in Urdu.

Instead of answering, she looks up with wide eyes and says, “Are you here to pick us up?”

Jason drops down to kneel in front of her. “No,” he says hurriedly. “I’m not with them, okay? You’re going to be – you’re going to be safe now.” He doesn’t often make promises but this, this at least he will ensure is true. He picks open the locks chaining them to each other but even without the physical ties, they stick close together.

“The men who you were supposed to go with are dead now,” he tells them. “The police will be here soon and they’ll make sure that you’re protected. If you don’t have anything to go home to, tell them. Be honest when you answer their questions. They want to help you.”

Some of the younger children hug him while he’s speaking, sobbing phrases in languages he doesn’t know yet. The older ones hang back; they, at least, don’t trust him blindly. Smart kids.

The girl who had responded to his questions pats his face and thanks him. She’s young, maybe five or six. Her face is smudged with dirt, but it seems more like the mess that kids accumulate during the day and less from over-neglect. It fits with what Jason had seen at Egon’s base in Germany.

He looks at her, considering. “There’s someone I’m looking for,” he says finally. “She’d be a little bit older than you. Her name is Lara and she’s from Panaji. Her dad really wants to see her again.”

“Panaji? In Goa?” She purses her lips and props her hands on her hips as she thinks. After a few seconds, her expression clears. “I know her!” she exclaims proudly. “She’s kind of bossy.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah,” she responds. “She never wants to play, even when the adults aren’t in the room, because she thinks that they’re still watching us! That makes no sense. If they’re not looking at us then how can they know what we’re doing? And,” she adds, lowering her voice and leaning closer, “she tried to run away.”

“Did it work?” Jason asks.

“Noooooo,” she says, drawing the word out to make it even more obvious that she thinks that it’s a stupid question. “She’s really short so she tried to hide in the wall and pretend that she’d already gotten out. But it didn’t work. They found her really quickly.”

Jason’s eyebrows raise at that. So little Rajkoomar had figured that they were under surveillance and had attempted to escape from her captors. Not bad for a seven-year-old.

“Do you know where she is right now?”

“Noooooo.” This time the stretch was one of uncertainty. “They were really mad that she tried to leave so they said that she wasn’t going to come to America with us.”

“Where were they holding you before,” Jason presses, “if it wasn’t in America?”

“I don’t know,” she replies, puffing out her cheeks. “But they spoke really funny. It wasn’t Urdu or Gujrati or Hindustani or-“

“So not in India,” he says amusedly.

“I gueeeess.”

“Thank you.” He collects his helmet from the floor of the freight car and rises to leave.

“Akhi!” The girl tugs on the sleeve of his jacket insistently. “Are you coming back? What’s your name?”

“I’m the Red Hood,” he says, sliding his helmet back on. The bio-verification system recognizes him and tells him that GCPD cruisers will be arriving in two minutes. “If you’re lucky,” he tells her seriously, “you’ll never see me again.”


	5. Chapter Four

Jason drops back onto the rooftop where he’d left his gear. As he feet touch the cement, his vision goes black at the edges. He staggers then crumples completely, unable to continue to ignore the pain. He manages to draw himself up to brace his back against a vent, but the vibrations of the metal jostle him forward and he decides to just keep himself upright.

The most pressing injury is the bullet wound in his leg. By the time he manages to find a roll of bandages at the bottom of his bag, blood has already soaked through the material of his pants and is beginning to drip onto the roof. He wraps the area quickly then uses the metal pins to secure it in place. Next up are his ribs. A quick assessment reveals that they’re not okay, by which he means that one second, he’s pressing a hand down on his upper chest and the next, he finds himself folded over, eyes watering and breath ragged. He peels his fingers out of their white-knuckled grip around the strap of his bag and forces himself to think.

He’s still at the freight yard – he can hear the commotion below as cruisers screech into the lot – and his closest safehouse is _fuck_ three miles east. The distance is laughably small but right now he doesn’t know how far he’ll make it before he finds himself in a pool of his own blood. He pictures himself swinging across a busy street and losing hold of his line, dropping into the midst of traffic as an eighteen-wheeler barrels towards him.

He needs to focus. He needs to get moving. He grabs his gear and stands, fighting past a brief burst of light-headedness. If he’s going to die, it won’t be like this.

 

 

He gets about a mile away before he realizes that he might need a change of plans. He misjudges a jump and slams into the side of a high-rise on the outskirts of Newtown. His vision whites out and he just barely maintains his hold on the line. Pain blooms in his chest, a deep-set ache that protests as he hooks his hands over the edge of the roof and heaves himself up. He finds himself on top of a raised concrete ledge that presumably acts as a railing to prevent people from falling off. As he hops down, his knees buckle under him and he folds. Blinks dazedly. The sky above is a dark swath of fabric pinpricked with stars but – no, that can’t be right. There are no stars in Gotham, no lights in the abyss. Jason scrambles to push himself up but the cement crumbles beneath him. Emptiness greets his searching hands. He –

 

 

 

 

 

He wakes in a puddle of his own blood, cold, nauseous and dizzy.

Jason sucks in a painful breath and drags himself upright once more. The adrenaline that had been keeping him moving has faded and he just feels limp with exhaustion. At this rate, he won’t make it ten more blocks, much less the remaining two miles between him and his destination. He bites his lip, thinking through the haze. After a few too many blinks, he realizes that he’s still sitting down.

This may potentially be a bad sign. Jason shuffles over to the edge of the roof and peers down.

The building he’s sprawled on top of faces Kane Street, which bisects Uptown and acts as a physical boundary separating Ottisburg and Newtown from Burnley and the Bowery. Across the road, the skyscrapers transform into cramped townhouses and rundown apartments, the cobbled streets into to alleys cast in shadow, and the bustle of activity even now, three hours past midnight, becomes the stifled quiet of a ghost-town.

Just a few blocks from here, two people’s deaths shifted the history of an entire city. And just a few blocks from there…

He stops. Is this what it’s come to? Dragging himself in like a dog that’s been hit by a car? But that dog would die if it didn’t receive treatment. Jason will just… Slowly bleed out as he leisurely strolls across the island. _Shitballs._

He stashes his gear somewhere he’s pretty sure no one will find it and drops his helmet next to the bag. His hand raises to the domino mask he wears underneath but after a few seconds’ deliberation, he leaves it on.

Even though he feels weak, even though he knows he can’t keep going for much longer, he grits his teeth and pushes past the tightness in his chest and the burning in his legs. He can’t afford to rest, not when he doesn’t know how long he was out for or just how much blood he lost in the interim.

Jason sees the neon-lit sign about ten minutes after he can no longer feel sensation in his leg. It’s a cool relief in the humid Gotham night. Something bitter catches in his throat. He scans the outside of the building. The windows are barred. The rooftop entrance is barred from the inside and sewer access is iffy when you’ve got a hole in your leg… He swallows. Closes his eyes.

Drops.

It’s more of a fall than a jump, and he lands awkwardly on the doorstep of the Gotham Free Clinic with a haze creeping into the edges of his vision. Jason clings onto the wood of the doorway, feels splinters digging through his glove and knows that _this_ , at least, is real.

Then he doesn’t know much else.


	6. Chapter Five

Dirt fills his mouth and nose, surrounding him until he’s completely buried. He screams, but there’s no air in his lungs – the earth pushes down on his chest, his lungs can’t expand, he can’t – he tries to dig himself out but he doesn’t know which way is up. His chest tightens and he tries to suck in oxygen but he can’t, he can’t breathe.

He dies.

Then he wakes up, throat raw and fingers scratching his neck and mouth, trying to breath, trying to breathe trying to breathe trying to breathe he can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t –

He hear raised voices, panicked, a woman says “how could it have worn off-“ Someone pushes him down, pushes his fingers away, pushes something over his mouth, his ears, his nose. He struggles, lashing out at the sensation but then: _air._ He goes limp.

The voices quiet to a murmur above him and he hears snippets of a conversation, though the words are disjointed and flicker past without meaning.

"How long- screaming-"

"-Throat – raw – we can't-"

"-Recovery shouldn’t-"

"Maybe – help-"

"This doesn’t make –“

"We need –"

"-Therapy – but that’s –“ 

 

Then, suddenly, finally, "No."

He blinks blearily, trying to focus on the shifting figures but they sway in and out of focus. It would be so much easier to just stop fighting and he just

 

slips

 

away.

 

This time, the darkness is welcoming.

 

He wanders a hallway with a million doors. He knows that each is locked, just as he knows that he could never pick any of them, that no matter how much force he uses, he would never be able to open a single one.

Instead, he walks. The hallway grows then shrinks around him, becoming a vast, endless space, then narrowing to a single point receding into the distance.

A door opens behind him. A child says gleefully, _“-fight together against-“_

He ignores it and keeps walking. One of doors beside him clicks and swings inwards. A man, torn apart by grief cries, _“he took me away from you –“_

He clenches his hands to keep them from shaking. The point in the distance comes closer – or is it that he moves towards it – even though he’s not moving. A single door stands before him. It remains closed but through the wood he hears, _“I’m done looking back.”_

He stops breathing.

A voice reverberates, sounding from behind him and beside him and from below and above and before, and it speaks the awful truth.

**“You remain unavenged.”**

Jason closes his eyes and feels wetness trickle down his cheeks. He takes one awful breath that rattles against the bars of his ribcage.  

Walks forward.

 

He wakes up.

 

He feels the cold first. It’s not to the extent of the bleak winters of Northeastern Europe he’d encountered while training, but it’s enough to make him hiss in a breath through clenched teeth. When he cranes his head, he realizes that he is alone. More pressing: he can’t move. There’s a clear tube resting on his chest.

Icy dread floods his veins. He pulls his arms against the bindings but he can’t get free. The rope digs against his skin as he yanks against it, heart hammering. The beeping of an ECG gets faster and louder and it’s the only thing that he can hear, even as he snarls. The coppery taste of blood floods his mouth. He tries to swallow it back but it just continues to flow down his throat and he chokes, spluttering. He coughs, lurching upwards as he retches, fighting against the burning pain in his lungs. He gasps, mouth working futilely, tears collecting at the corner of his eyes. Finally, after eternities, something in his chest clicks open and when he sucks in a breath, his chest expands slowly. The tube rises with it.

Fucking fuckery they put it inside him. Okay. He assesses the outrage and burst of confusion and deems them unhelpful at this point, putting them aside so that he can think clearly. His head spins, even as he lies breathless. Pain blooms across his chest, though it’s a distant cottony feeling. His throat aches even as he pants, desperate for air. Once the pounding in his head begins to ease, he shifts, testing his range of motion.

He’s on his back, arms and legs strapped down. There _is_ a beeping noise, and it really is from an ECG somewhere outside of his field of vision. He focuses on the steady pulse of noise, and lets it drown out everything else.

Breathes.

There’s a pinching sensation from the vague direction of his hand and he shifts around until he can crane his head, pushing upwards against the restraints to see an IV inserted into the back of his hand. He follows the line around and up to a blood bag drip dripping down. Looks around.

The room itself is small, worn but impeccably clean. There are two chairs arranged by the door, cabinets installed on the wall and a counter with a sink and more cabinets below. On the wall beside the bed, there are posters lecturing the importance of regular screening, safe sex, and the importance of consent haphazardly tacked next to a cork board with sheets of paper. A particularly cheerful A4 advises him to ‘check his situation’. It looks like a room in any regular walk-in clinic but…

It’s not difficult to remember a place he’d been in and out of as a kid, when he’d thought that magic was real and he could have it if he wore someone else’s hand-me-downs.

He wonders hazily why he’s in Leslie’s clinic before everything starts to filter back to him. He blanches, feeling his stomach twist, and closes his eyes against the sting of regret.

He’d been careless; the man in the caboose could have just as easily shot his captives instead of going after Jason. More children could have been dead, more kids instead of just the one he’d –

His stomach lurches. He gags on the acrid aftertaste of blood and bile and _a kid recruited into another of Gotham’s wars, who could have been handsome if it weren’t for the fear._ Jason recalls the easy slide of metal, flesh parting beneath the blade of his knife, the gasp and the gurgle of blood bubbling out and the desperate plea in eyes that had slowly drained of life.

He sucks in a breath and starts to laugh.


	7. Chapter Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for references to drug use (by side characters, but which did lead to death as a result of a canonical overdose), by which i mean hard drugs not like weed. slight implications of child abuse? if you take it that way? because you heard it here first folks, i h8 willis todd

Just as his laughter begins to taper into something tinged with hysteria, the door swings open.

Leslie Thompkins stares at him with wide eyes. Her face is lined with more wrinkles than the last time he’d seen her, and it makes her stunned expression all the more vulnerable.

“Jason,” she says, softly, almost disbelievingly.

From somewhere forgotten inside him, he drags up a winning smile and says, “What’s up, doc?”

Leslie’s face shutters, shifting into something harsher. “So, Bruce was telling the truth.” She purses her lips. “I had hoped that you would amount to something better than this,” she muses. Even though she’s looking at him, it feels like she’s seeing someone else’s ghost.

“Better than this?” The words twist in Jason’s mouth. “Better than what, alive?”

“Better than a murderer!” Leslie cries. “Do you even know what you’re doing? How many people have died because of you?”

“I haven’t killed anyone who hasn’t deserved it!” Jason grinds out. “The world is better off without those scum.”

“You have no right,” she says lowly, “to play witness, judge, and executioner. Those people deserved a fair trial, no matter what you think they did.”

“What - What I think they did?” he repeats incredulously. “Rapists, pedophiles, murderers, slavers – and you think they deserve anything other death?”

“You don’t get to make that call!” Leslie snaps. “I can excuse Bruce running around playing hero because he works with the law. He doesn’t overstep his boundaries and he knows where to stop. You’re not just toeing the line, you’ve -”

“I’m not Bruce,” Jason bellows.

Leslie recoils, face pale, and he forces himself to slump back, uncurling his fists. His skin stings where it had been pressed against the rope bindings.

“I’m not Bruce,” he says again, quietly into the silent room. “I’m not and never have been and never will be. I don’t care what you think, I don’t care how many deaths it takes. This city is a cesspool of filth.” Only one of these statements is a lie.

“And is that what you’re doing,” she asks critically, “cleaning up the filth? Just an everyday janitor.”

“I’ll be an exterminator if I have to,” Jason replies. “The best way to take care of rats is to wipe them all out.”

Leslie shakes her head slowly. “You’re not just a murderer,” she says, voice disbelieving. “You’re a sociopath.”

“If that’s what you want to think, go right ahead.”

Leslie scoffs, mouth twisting, then looks away.

After a stretch of silence, she purses her lips. She leaves the room for a few seconds, then comes back in loosely gripping a manila file folder. She flips it open and looks back up at him, face schooled into the detached but vaguely disapproving expression that Jason remembers from his childhood.

“So,” she says flatly. “when you arrived at our clinic, you were not in any state to ask for treatment, but we have a responsibility to not turn away anyone in need. The Kevlar vest you were wearing was enough to prevent any actual gunshot perforations, but the force resulted in several contusions across the lower torso, as well as a fracture in your fourth rib. You also had a traumatic pneumothorax, which we dealt with through the chest tube insertion. You’ll need to keep it in for a day more before we’ll take it out, just so that your lung can re-inflate properly. I would also appreciate it if you did not disturb the bindings immobilizing your chest. Though the bullet wound in your leg was not overly severe, it was likely aggravated by your frolicking across the rooftops. You did experience significant blood loss, but I suppose it’s fortunate for you that our annual blood drive took place just a week ago.”

“How serendipitous,” Jason responds tightly.

“The clinic staff think that your name is Jacob Peters,” Leslie continues, ignoring the quip. “I’ll assume you approve, since that’s the name on your undoubtedly fake driver’s license.”

He rolls his eyes. “Should I say thank you?” he asks sarcastically.

“If you’re that grateful, then co-operate.” Leslie grits. “You knocked on my door and that made you my patient. While you’re here, you’ll be courteous to my staff, you’ll stay in this bed, and you _will not harm_ a single person in this clinic. Is that clear?”

Jason bares his teeth in an approximation of a grin. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”

Leslie’s expression shifts again, as if she’s seen something distasteful, and she nods sharply. “Get some rest, then.” This time, when she leaves, it’s for good.

Jason’s head thuds back onto the pillow and he lets himself relax for the first time since the good doc had walked into the room. When was the last time he’d seen Leslie? It must have been at some point before Ethiopia, but no matter how much Jason wracks his brain, he can’t recall exactly when. Thinking back on it, Jason doesn’t remember ever interacting with Leslie all that often. She had been fairly disapproving of his presence for most of his time as Robin – though that wasn’t exactly an outlier. What made Leslie different was that she was one of the few people who knew Jason from Before.

Catherine Todd hadn’t been any form of a regular patient at the Free Clinic, but she’d probably been there often enough to leave an impression. Besides, Catherine had less costly ways of finding a fix than going through legal channels; it was just that Jason was the one who had to deal with the fallout when she did. Sometimes, when he was scared that she’d gone a little too far, it was the Clinic’s door that he’d knocked on for help. Leslie didn’t judge him for his mom. She didn’t ask why he wasn’t in school or why his skin was mottled with bruises. She was the one who taught him about placebos and sugar pills, how to crush them up and swap them when it was getting bad. In the end, it hadn’t been enough, but God, could it ever have been?

And then, in the space after, between one death and the next, Jason had kept himself busy. Cotton balls were a luxury for people shooting up on the street, and so was tape. Jason had figured that the Free Clinic had both in no small amount and taken it upon himself to relieve them of the excess. A small kid wandering in by himself was usually something that caught people’s attention, but he’d managed to slip in and out without ever getting caught. At the time he’d thought that he was just That Good but looking back, it was more likely that the clinic staff had just turned a blind eye. Everyone in Gotham was trying to hustle, in one way or another, and Jason’s method wasn’t harming anyone.

Eventually, when his luck had run out, as all luck does, he’d been caught by Leslie with three packs of cotton balls stuffed into a ratty backpack. He’d found the bag in a dumpster with the bottom frayed and one strap snapped. Three tight knots plus a bunch of safety pins later, and it was as good as second-hand. The cotton balls had been in a locked cabinet in the lab room where patients dropped off little plastic jars filled with something Jason hoped wasn’t pee. The door locked as soon as it closed anyways so it wasn’t like Jason was leaving it for all of Gotham to help themselves. Leslie hadn’t taken to that explanation as well as he’d thought she would. She’d accused him of enabling other people to kill themselves the same way that Catherine did. He hadn’t spoken to her much after that, even as Robin. Leslie never let on that she’d known him, but Jason knew that inside she still thought he was some kid that didn’t care what other people did to ruin what was left of their lives as long as he didn’t have to see it.  

The difference between him and Leslie, he thinks, is that Leslie still thought that people could choose the life they lived. Jason knows now that everyone in Gotham is dealt the same shit hand and that no matter how hard you try, the blood, the sweat, and the tears amount to nothing in the end. No Gothamite will ever be free the way they want to be, not once city’s got her claws hooked in under their skin. Even Leslie had tried to leave once, as if she deserved freedom any more than the other forsaken soul in this damned pit, but she’s Gotham’s through and through. If you're born in Gotham, you die in Gotham. Jason takes the fact that he's alive now to mean that he's just ticking down to a death within the city limits to correct what happened before. 

With Leslie out of the room now, the room shrinks to him, his bed, and the space around him. He waits for something to happen, but the door remains closed, the IV continues to drip, and chest tube lags slowly above every breath. He settles for staring at the ceiling, a sky of offensively beige water-stained panels and glaring fluorescent lights. The one in the corner blinks occasionally and he counts the seconds in between the flickers. It varies but he thinks that maybe if he stopped counting, he could find a pattern in the spaces. He doesn’t stop counting.

When he’s finally, inevitably bored, he passes the time by singing songs that had been old before he was born, but that he remembers Catherine singing to him in the night, voice low and rasping in the dark.

He closes his eyes and thinks about her; the smell of the cheap corner-store cigs she bummed off the streetwalkers, the way her hair would brush against his cheek when she leaned over to kiss his forehead, her smile when he would crawl out from whatever nook he hid in while Willis was with them, her laugh when he’d looked up at her and swore that he would get them out of that fucking loft in a five-family townhouse on the shittiest alley in the worst neighbourhood in all of Gotham. He closes his eyes and thinks about the way she’d looked when he found her sprawled on the floor, stinking of piss and worse things. The way she’d looked when he’d packed up everything they hadn’t sold yet into that threadbare backpack and left before someone else found the body. Catherine’s body.

His mom’s body.

He stops singing.

Eventually, someone else comes in. It’s a nurse, clad in loose green scrubs and a face mask and carrying the same manila folder that Leslie had been holding. On the corner there are three colourful stickers: an orange P, a yellow E, and a blue T. The nurse takes three steps into the room and makes it to the side of his bed, then pauses, fidgeting with something beyond his line of sight before coming back into view, holding the folder open.

“See something you like?” he cracks.

There’s a pause before the nurse reacts, head swinging up to look at him.

“Mr. Peters!” A gasp. “I hadn’t realized you were awake.”

A thought, filed away: the angle of the rooms in Leslie’s clinic are such that the bed is directly across from anyone who opens the door.

“I’m a light sleeper,” he says, and lets his smile wider. “My clothes…?” He trails off, letting the words become a question.

“I’m not sure I should be telling you anything about those,” the nurse says brightly, “when you’re not going to be needing them anytime soon.”

He laughs. “Do you think I’m going to try to leave this bed?” He yanks at the restraints to add into the implausibility of the idea. “I’m open to suggestions, if you have any.”

The nurse sounds vaguely disapproving in a familiar way. “I’m not going to tell you how to escape, Mr. Peters.”

He sighs exaggeratedly before giving a rueful grin. “It was worth a try.” Even though it’s been a while since he’s played civilian, ‘disarming wisecracker who is possibly a gang-member’ is a fairly easy role to slip into. He thinks. If anyone disagrees, they’ve never bothered to tell him. Or lived long enough to.

“What’s your name?” he asks instead.

The response is slow in the _why do you need to know_ kind of way. “Hill.”

“Nice to meet you meet you, nurse Hill.” He thinks back to what Leslie had told him and says, “I’m Jacob. But you probably already knew that.”

The nurse may or may be smiling underneath that face mask. “It’s good to see you’re feeling better, Mr. Peters.”

“Good to be feeling better,” Jason responds. “But you know, it would be even more amazing to have my clothes-“

There’s a quiet snort before Hill grabs the clipboard. “I might see you later,” the nurse says, and he _knows_ there’s a smile under there. “If you’re still awake.”

He feigns being wounded and Hill laughs and leaves. He waits a few moments before he lets himself relax, a rush of exhaustion washing over him. He lets it take him under, just

for

a

few

seconds

.

..

…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oof what are philosophical discussions on the merits of vigilantism. all references to walk-in clinic layouts and filing systems inspired by the real life fuckery of paper charts and labs. 
> 
> also: living on the streets is not a glamourous thing, people and it certainly isn't an easy way of life. the poverty rate in NA as a whole is distressingly high and while i hope that most aren't placed into the situation that Jason faced growing up, it is something that many people do experience. homelessness is a big problem, especially in major cities and regions like Sillicon Valley, New York, Toronto, etc. where despite the prevalence of the middle to upper-class lifestyle, an alarming amount of citizens don't even have a place to sleep in the night or warm food to eat. when Jason says that people in Gotham are dealt a shit hand, he refers to the cycle of poverty where children that grow up in low-income households often do not have the resources that they need to escape their situation. a lack of access to affordable high-quality education and institutions, health and dental care, or even just nutritious food, as well as high crime and drug abuse rates, the school to prison pipeline faced by many African-American youth, and the gangs that many kids join out a need to find protection that they think won't be provided by cops - all of these factors feed into the fact that it's difficult to grow past the limitations set by your birth. 
> 
> ok sorry that was my rant about that please ignore it if you want haha. my last two cents are that seeing catherine todd's body after she OD'd prob messed Jason up a lot and that aside from the nameless grunts that die in the chapters they're introduced in, there are no OCs in this fic!


	8. Chapter Seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not a fan of this chapter but it's Necessary :[

He blinks awake slowly, wading out of the shallow pull of sleep. He drags his tongue over his bottom lip, feeling it catch on the ridges of a cut that stings distantly when he puts more pressure on it. He yawns, pulling a face at the bitter taste at the back of his throat.

“Jason,” Batman says. He’s standing by the side of the bed, mouth pressed into a stiff line.

Jason looks up at him. At this angle, the flickering overhead lights cast shadows onto Bruce’s face and they cling to him in a way that they never quite stuck to the golden boy. It’s an angle Jason is overly familiar with. He turns away, noticing a loose thread in the corner of the thin bed sheet, and stares at it with a vague sort of annoyance.

“Jason.” Bruce repeats flatly. No one else ever manages pack that much disapproval into the two syllables of his name. “What are you doing here?”

“I dunno,” Jason puffs out his cheeks and squints up at him. “But I’m sure you’re dying to tell me.”

Bruce does that thing where he _looms,_ shoulders heaving up under the heavy cloak. “Your presence here puts every patient in this clinic at risk,” he grinds out.

“ _I’m_ a patient,” Jason rolls his eyes. “I’m not putting myself at risk. Chill, Bruce.”

Bruce exhales. He looks down at Jason and some of his anger seems to drain out of him. Without the self-righteous drivel, he looks oddly smaller. “What are you doing, Jason?” His voice is quiet, softened by something tired.

Jason feels tired too. He closes his eyes. “Waiting to die,” he says, and only part of him doesn’t mean it.

There’s a stunned, abrupt silence wherein Jason clenches and unclenches his hand, feeling the knuckles crack as they shift against each other. It does nothing to unwrap the knot settled in his chest.

Then Bruce says, “What do you mean? Your injuries – “

“Not from this,” Jason scoffs, rolling his eyes. “ _Gosh_ B, you can be so literal sometimes.” Something like a laugh spills out past his mouth, pulled taut with tension.

Bruce is a blank wall as he processes that. Whether he thought that was a joke or not was up in the air; you could never really know with him. In the end, he says, “What were you talking about, if not –“ he shifts, stiffly, then gestures at Jason, lying prone on the bed, “- this.”

Jason does his best to shrug. “I don’t think you really need to know.”

He’s delighted to see a muscle near Bruce’s jaw jump, the one concession he made when he was starting to get pissed at Jason.

“I think that’s my call to make,” Bruce says flatly.

There’s a moment where he goes breathless with rage, where his fingers curl into a fist, and the muscles in his arms tense against the cords binding them. Then he breathes, and the moment passes and all that’s left is the anger and the dizzying feel of hate burning a hole in his stomach. It’s a bitter, cloying taste.

“That’s the thing,” Jason snarls, “I don’t think it is. I don’t owe you an explanation or an elaboration or, or whatever the _fuck_ it is you want from me. You don’t get to waltz in here now and pretend you have any say in what I do.”

“Jason – “

“There’s no one here by that name,” Jason interrupts. “And the man I am right now has nothing on his criminal record that merits a visit from _the Bat._ So that means you don’t need to be here.”

“You’re acting like – “

“You don’t need to be _anywhere_ near here,” Jason says, voice rising.

Bruce – Batman – clenches his jaw. “I didn’t come here for this,” he snaps. “Just answer the question.”

Jason laughs and it’s a harsh, grating sound, filled with something more than anger. “What are you going to do to get the answer you want?” he sneers. “You gonna beat it out of me?” His arms yank at the restraints in an aborted attempt to spread them and he smiles. It’s an ugly, bitter thing. “I gave everything for you,” he says, and it feels like a confession. “You’re not getting anything more from me.”

Bruce stills. In that breathless moment, he has the same kind of harsh, classical beauty that inspired ancient Greco-Roman statues. The moment passes, and Aphrodite breathes life into Pygmalion’s statue. Bruce exhales and becomes something more human. He snags the chair resting by the wall and sinks down into it. The passive stare of the cowl offers no hint as to what he’s thinking and beneath it, Bruce’s mouth has settled into a tight-lipped line. It purses then opens then pauses, as if considering. Then, two words Jason never thought he would hear:

“I’m sorry.”

 Jason freezes. “What?” The word comes out strangled, stripped raw. He tries to recover, sure that he’s drifting again, stuck in some space outside of reality where he’s found something that isn’t – has never been (and will never be) – true. After a few seconds, it sinks in that this is actually happening. Bruce really is sitting beside the bed, and he really does have the balls to pretend that he gives a flying fuck about Jason – this Jason, not the one who died years ago but the one in front of him now. In that breathless, terrible moment, Jason realizes that he will never be able to forgive Bruce.

“- were obviously still upset,” he’s saying, when the ringing in Jason’s ears fades. “It was a bad call to let you into the field with that mindset.”

“What mindset are we talking about here,” Jason interrupts, voice acidic. “The one where I thought I could help people? Or the one where I thought _you_ could?”

“The one where you thought you were invincible,” Bruce snarls, “and that there wouldn’t be any consequences to your actions.”

Jason bites back everything he wants to say to respond to that. He’d never thought that he was invincible, just that if he died, it wouldn’t matter. He’d been right, of course, but he can’t say that to Bruce’s face. The man seems to think that the best counselling a person can receive is in a mental asylum.

He blinks. Reins himself back in. He unclenches his jaw then his fingers from where they’d been digging into the frame of the bed.

Bruce is still waiting for an answer, he realizes. Well, tough luck, Jason isn’t biting.

“Shouldn’t you be on patrol?” he asks instead, forcing his voice to return to a more moderate volume. “Preventing the superstitious and cowardly lot from continuing down the wrong path? I heard Freeze escaped.” _Why haven’t you left yet?_

Bruce’s face is impassive. “He was returned go Arkham two nights ago,” he says.

“Two nights?” Jason’s eyebrows raise. That’s a bit strange considering – “He broke out yesterday.”

“It’s Thursday,” Bruce replies. “You’ve been in the clinic for three days.”

 _I never could get the hang of Thursdays,_ Jason thinks reflexively. Then, _no wonder I feel like shit._ Then the full meaning of Bruce’s statement sinks in.

“You can’t be serious,” he splutters.

“It’s the 8th of April.” Bruce confirms flatly.

“Thursday,” Jason whistles. “Wow. Okay.” His mind flickers, for an instant, to the kids from the train and the old woman who’d been abandoned by her husband. He wonders, irrationally, if they’re still receiving treatment. “Okay,” he repeats numbly.

Bruce watches him, silent.

He ignores the feeling that the cowl is boring a through him, that Bruce could somehow peel away all of the layers of Jason’s skin and examine the hollowness inside. He’s seen the schematics for the cowl. It may come equipped with night vision and infrared lenses but there’s no x-ray vision built in. Yet. He breathes in. Exhales. Turns his head to the side and looks at Bruce directly.

“If it’s been three days,” he says, “why are you just sitting here and talking to me?”

“Is there something else I should be doing?” Bruce tilts his head, voice mild. It’s unsettling.

“The last time I saw you,” Jason says, “you told me that you thought I should be in Arkham.”

“To see a counsellor! Surely you understand that you need to talk to someone.”

“So, you’d throw me in prison to have that happen?” Jason scoffs. “Do you even hear yourself?”

“If you were in Arkham, you could be safe from anyone seeking to harm you, as well as receive a more substantial diet than whatever you’re subsisting on. You would be living in something better than an abandoned subway car.” Bruce crossed his arms, disapproval clear.

“You think I would be _safe?_ ” Jason repeats incredulously. “In _Arkham?_ Do you know how many people I’ve put in that place? What do you think would happen if any of them found out that I’m the Red Hood? I know I’m messed up, okay, but I’m dealing with it myself. I don’t need your help. I don’t need you – any of you.”

“Jason, you’re not dealing with it,” Bruce’s voice softens, out of what, pity? Jason’s stomach lurches. “Leslie told me that your iron levels are dangerously low. Your TSH is low, did you even know that? You’re not taking care of yourself –“

“Shut the fuck up,” Jason hisses. “I’m not a child, Bruce. What happens to me is none of your business.”

Bruce frowns, as if Jason is the one being unreasonable. “There’s no point discussing it when you’re like this.” He rises out of the chair, and the metal legs grate on the floor as it slides back.

“That’s it?” Jason asks in disbelief. “The conversation isn’t going your way, so you just leave?”

“The only one running away here,” Bruce says, jaw clenched, “is you.” He turns and places a hand on the doorknob.

“What does that even mean?” Jason grumbles.

The door clicks shut.

Left to lie in the room by himself, his anger – the main force keeping him awake – slowly drains away. He’s left feeling exhausted and confused, mind too hazy to think straight. He blinks once, twice, drifting in the waters of sleep.

Eventually, as always, he slips under.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What is the universe this fic is set in? That is a very good question, asked by no one ever. Pre-52 is canon up until uhh the beginning of Battle for the Cowl tho that in itself is messy. Jason has never had a sidekick because it really doesn’t make sense for his character?? So Scarlet doesn't exist ig. New 52… is weird and I don’t even know where to start with that. So uhh backstory is in line with the Lost Days, keeping his original post-Crisis origin. I liked the letter Willis wrote to Jason in the new RH series but I haven't read any of that so you prob won't be seeing much of the characterization from that. Starfire and Roy may show up but it might not be in the lines of RHATO. Damian hasn't died yet because I hate Talia's characterization in that entire storyline, but when I originally wrote this, he'd just died so he wasn't really part of the plan ahha i was in grief. 
> 
> Anyways, in this universe, Jason goes on his fieldtrip with Donna and Ray, comes back, teams up with Tim for a little, gets arrested and sent to prison, is told that Bruce is dead, hears the will, thinks about trying to take over the role of Batman but eventually realizes that he doesn’t want to associate himself with the role (screw the concept that he wanted to wear the cowl). Instead he decides that he can clean up Gotham as the Red Hood and avoids the whole mess of the Batfam. He doesn’t get sent to Arkham so I guess this ignores the second half of Batman and Robin. What was Jason doing while Dick was Batman with Dami and then after Bruce took over the role again? We’ll find out at some point. Batman Inc confused me so that's not a thing sorry.
> 
> Kudos to you, if you read all of that. It's pretty much my process of figuring out this whole fic.


	9. Chapter Eight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: implied/described awakening during an operation so some body horror, the Joker shows up for a bit

“Forehand or backhand?” The Joker tosses the crowbar up and catches it with one hand as he speaks. “C’mon, work with me, kid. We’re collecting feedback from all our clients and _you’re_ our best customer.” He pulls back and swings the metal prongs into Jason’s stomach.

As Jason lurches forward, heaving, blood and spittle dripping down from his mouth, the Joker crouches down and lifts his head up by the chin.

“Little Robin,” he croons, in his sickly-sweet rasp, “do you know what you are? The people of Gotham might be scared of Batman but you, you’re a sign of hope. Life, if you will, after the harsh, cold winter.” He clasps his hands to his chest and looks dramatically into the distance, eyes wide. “But let me tell you something Gotham will learn,” he sneers, voice dropping from the falsetto. “We don’t need hope. And you,” he says, slamming the bar onto the back of Jason’s head, “don’t need to be alive.”

 

The pain burns like a flame settled on his chest. There’s a prick against his skin then pressure as something cool digs in under his flesh.

Jason tries to flinch away, but he realizes, with a dawning horror, that his arms are literally – and figuratively – tied. He can’t move at all, even to open his eyes. Despite the building sense of panic, his heartbeat is maddeningly slow, and his breathing stays steady, an echoing rasp in his ears. He is forced to sit in darkness, unable to react to the slide of metal hooking in and out of his skin and the burn spreading through his veins.

Finally, after an eternity, he hears a burst of muffled dialogue. There’s the clink of metal against slightly thinner sheet metal, and then, seconds later, the squeak of a tap turning and running water. Eventually the tap turns again, the water turns off, and the pressure against his nose and cheeks is relieved. Fabric rustles. He feels cloth brush over the exposed skin of his forearms and then, even more gently, a hand brushes the hair back from his forehead. A door swings open, footsteps recede. The door quietly clicks shut.

 

Jason opens his eyes.

He’s in the same room, still restrained, still left with the distant aching feeling that has settled over him. The bed has been raised at an angle, so that he is not quite sitting at a 135-degree angle. Like this, he can see that the tube is no longer protruding from his chest. More importantly, the strap running perpendicular to his torso has been removed.

Jason gingerly curls over until he can use his teeth to unhook the strap around his right arm. Once that’s loose, he can easily reach over to release the other hand and then free his legs and feet. He slides himself around to sit at the edge of the bed and places his feet on the cool tile. He pushes off carefully, mindful of the dim pain in his leg as his muscles adjust to standing for the first time in days. Once he feels more stable, he wobbles over to the door. There’s a plastic basket attached to the other side, and a manila folder is sloppily placed inside. ‘Jacob Peters,’ it says, in cramped sharpie across the bottom. There’s a moment of disconnect before he remembers the fake ID he seems to be registered under.

The first page is filled with scribbles in blue ink and the most he can make of it are his fake name and a few numbers that look like they could a date. He squints but can’t quite figure out if the numbers in the middle are 05, 06, or 08. The next page is typed and seem to be the results from a blood test. There are values for creatinine, albumin, and what looks like a complete blood count, but he doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The page after that is a summary of observations from an x-ray then there’s a urine analysis and more sheets filled with scribbles.

Jason bites back the flash of anger – at the breach of his privacy and testing without his consent, and the fear that maybe there were other, more invasive tests done whose results haven’t been placed in the chart yet or were sent directly to Bruce – and forces himself to take a step back and look at the numbers.

He reads through the file slowly, frown deepening as he realizes that there doesn’t seem to be anything especially wrong. His CBC is a bit low but that can be explained by the fact that he’d been shot. The x-ray describes the cracked rib and pneumothorax Leslie had mentioned but honestly, when he presses down he doesn’t feel all that much pain. Oh, wait, never mind, there it is. Pulling the paper shirt aside, he finds that where the chest tube had been inserted, there is now a neat row of stitches. He hisses out a breath at the sight of the puckered, inflamed flesh and pokes it. Yep, that still hurts.

He drops the file back into the basket and purses his lips. The window of time left before Leslie or someone else walks by is shrinking and he needs to find a way out of the building fast.

He takes a look around, scanning the hallway for a way out. The walls have been repainted, he realizes distantly, dreary grays and browns replaced by a bright green. Where before there had been stacked plastic bins filled with loose health pamphlets, a large impressionist print now hangs. Even the floor is different; a dark brown tile instead of the scuffed linoleum he remembers.

He gives himself a shake and keeps going. He skips past the sparse kitchenette and the three examination rooms, knowing from memory that none of them have windows or vents big enough to get out. As he rounds the corner, he hears the clip of footsteps coming down the hall. A spark of panic lights in his stomach and he darts towards the one room that’s almost always left unlocked, hoping against hope that this is one thing that has been left unchanged.

The knob turns easily under his hand and he slips into the room, waiting for a minute for the clip of heels to pass. Once he’s mostly sure that he’s not in immediate danger of being caught, he feels along the wall for the light, blinking as the room casts off its shadows.

The storage room of Leslie’s clinic looks like it hasn’t been touched in years; the same boxes shoved precariously on top of filing cabinets, the same plastic fern in the corner, and even the rolling shelving unit that squeaks exactly the way it used to when he pushes it with one finger. Jason wades through the clutter to the back of the room where, under three other cardboard boxes and a thick layer of dust, he unearths the Lost and Found bin. He pulls the bin away from the wall and rifles through the stray pieces of clothing that had been discarded and dumped into it over the years.

He finds, among the various sets of gloves and one-sided flip flops, three pairs of jeans and a pair of sweatpants. There’s also a ripped long sleeved cardigan, two tie-dyed t-shirts, a puffy pink parka, and two beanies, one of which is neon green and the other a lurid shade of orange.

All of the jeans are too small so after a quick sniff, he pulls on the sweatpants and cardigan, then shoves the green beanie over his hair. He eyes the flip flops with no small amount of hesitation. At this time of year, going out without them might actually attract less attention and be less of a hindrance to his mobility. He lifts one up and checks the size before dropping it back into the bin. Barefoot it is.

Now clothed, however tackily, Jason opens the door and slips back out into the hallway. Left will take him to the room where he’d been kept but going right should lead him towards the stairs to the ground floor. From what he remembers, Leslie’s office is just past the lab and both of them are downstairs, so he should have a bit more time to get out of the building.

With that in mind, he heads right, paying no heed to the gray door at the end of the hall until, as he’s slinking past, there’s a quiet ding and it slides open.

Jason freezes for a second, heart hammering, before his eyes light upon the sign for the stairwell. He sprints towards it and throws the door open, flying down the steps as quickly as his legs will take him.  
Behind him, he hears the clack of heels on the tile. “Who’s there?” Leslie calls sharply. Her voice has always carried and now it cuts through the silence of the clinic. He ignores it and keeps going.

Two flights down and he scrambles through the first floor of the clinic, past the lab and main office and through the waiting room. His feet skid over the mats but he ducks his head down, pushes for one last burst of speed, pushes against the door to the outside world until finally:  
  
_Freedom._


	10. Chapter Nine

A blast of muggy air greets him as he stumbles out of the clinic. The asphalt digs into his bare feet, but he doesn’t stop running until he’s more than a few blocks away from the clinic. He slows as he passes Park Row, maybe out of some misplaced sentimentality, but there’s nothing there for him. He keeps moving, turning sharply into another alley, dodging pools of vomit and who knows what else, always heading west. He stops finally at the crosswalk of one of the busier intersections in the Bowery, noting a fresh set of bouquets and candles by the post as he waits for both lights to turn red. A red convertible with racing stripes skids past just as he’s about to step into the street, honking. From the back seat, he hears a whistle and a call of “How much for an hour?” Jason doesn’t laugh along. It starts to rain.

Rain in Gotham is like piss; it’s warm, not something you’d ever want in your mouth, and it happens several times a day. In this in-between time bridging summer and what passes for spring, showers can last anywhere from half an hour to more than a day straight. There’s no sense in trying to wait it out. He skirts around a rapidly forming puddle in the middle of the road, hunches his shoulders, and walks a bit faster.

Once he’s into the higher traffic areas on the boundary of the Bowery and Burnley, where the buildings are newer and a bit closer together, he pulls himself up onto the rooftops. He finds his gear and helmet undisturbed where he’d stashed them and slips his jacket back on over the thin cardigan, finding some reprieve from the rain. From there, it’s only a matter of a few more minutes before he’s disengaging his security rig and slipping through the window of safehouse number who-even-cares.

Jason grabs some clean clothes and double checks that the alarms are primed before limping towards the bathroom. His feet sting, leaving little splotches of red on the tile, and he realizes that he must have stepped on glass at some point. He sits on the floor and picks out the little shards still stuck in his flesh with a tweezer. It’s with no small amount of relief that he finally peels off his wet clothes and steps into the shower.

He stands under the spray, soap stinging in his eyes and the cuts on his feet, as lukewarm water runs cold. It’s only when he starts to shiver that he turns off the tap. He stays still for a moment, dripping wet, forehead braced against the tiled wall. The tap drips once, twice. His exhale is just a little bit past too-loud.

As he dresses, he watches his reflection in the mirror. As always, a stranger looks back at him with scorn. For once, the sight doesn’t fill him with anger so much as a feeling of exhaustion that shifts under his skin.

 _‘What are you doing?’_ the stranger asks him. _‘What the fuck are you doing?’_

Jason doesn’t bother to respond. Even if he knew the answer, there’d be no point in saying it.

He shuffles out of the washroom and flops onto the mattress in the corner. Outside, the rain continues. The sound of water hitting the window lulls him to sleep.

 

In the dream, they place him into his coffin still alive. There is no need for an autopsy, but Leslie looks down at him impassively as she slides a scalpel through his flesh. She doesn’t bother to sew him up after. His ribs and skull are shattered, his lungs are scorched, and his stomach and intestines slip loosely out from his body. Bruce wraps his cape around him gently; it is the only thing keeping the pieces of him together, but Jason is dismayed to see the bright yellow slowly bleeds to red. He knows, in the vague certainty that only dreams provide, that Dick, Babs, and Alfred are the ones to place him in the box.

 _“Let me out,”_ Jason tries to say, but the words are muffled as Harley Quinn wraps a gag around his head, eyes regretful.

 _“Let me out,”_ he begs, but they slide the lid shut regardless. He feels himself being lifted then lowered down into the earth. He hammers against the top but it doesn’t budge; they’ve already started filling the grave. Jason unbuckles his belt with shaking fingers, leaving smears of blood across the white of his shirt. He bangs the metal of the buckle against the lid, desperate to see it budge.

 _“I’m sorry,”_ he sobs. _“Please, no, I’m sorry.”_

The coffin lid breaks. He suffocates under an avalanche of dirt.


	11. Chapter Ten

Jason shudders awake, hands fisted in the thin sheet. He draws in one painful breath that rattles the bars of his chest then tilts his head back as he exhales slowly. He pulls the fabric of his shirt away from his skin and uses it to mop away the wetness on his cheeks and neck.

Golden light filters through the slats of the shutters and casts long shapes on the floor and wall. The city, removed from his quiet suffering, holds its breath.

“Fuck,” he says, quietly.

He pushes himself up and takes another shower.

 

Talia doesn’t pick up when he calls, and he doesn’t bother to leave a message. Kapoor doesn’t respond either but just as he’s about to hang up there’s a click.

“Hood.” It’s the assistant, Raya. Her voice, though politely demure, is flat and stings with a tinge of annoyance.

“Look, I know it’s been a few days -”

“It’s been four days,” Raya says, “with no contact.”

“Four very productive days,” Jason counters.

“The only confirmation we had that you were taking this investigation seriously was the shipment you intercepted. We need more updates than that,” Raya stresses. “There are lives depending on whether or not you succeed.”

“You know my track record,” Jason says in response. “You chose to ask me for help on this. I don’t see how me giving you my diary is necessary.”

“I don’t need to know about if your crush smiled at you in the hall,” Raya scoffs. “Just regular reports. Some kind of log to show progress. Isn’t it better if we collaborate on this case?”

“I didn’t sign up for a group project. Your boss told me that she’d given me all the information you had. There’s nothing else you can help me with.”

“How typical of a white, male American. Are you too arrogant to believe that an Indian woman could do your job?”

“How typical to assume that I’m white.” Jason rolls his eyes. “It’s not a question of race or ability; I just feel more comfortable working on my own.”

Unfortunately, the debate doesn’t end there.

 

When he’s finally able to drop the call, he grabs a spare jacket and helmet and heads out to find some food. There’s a street cart stopped a block over from the park by the Sprang Bridge overpass. The vendor eyes his duffel and the knot of scar tissue on the back of his hand as Jason passes over a wad of bills but in the end, she pulls the bill of her Knights cap lower and counts out his change. Scars are common on this side of the river, visible or not. What’s more unusual is that he doesn’t cover them up.

He sits on the edge of a rooftop and scarfs down his third chilli dog. In the distance, the light of the Cape Carmine lighthouse sweeps across the bay as the fog that’s been hanging over the city starts to roll in. By the time he’s done two more, the sky is streaked with orange and red, colouring the thick fog settled in the streets below. Jason licks the sauce off his fingers and hops down from his perch.

Gothamites don’t like to go out in this type of weather. Visibility goes low and it’s hard to see even two feet in front of your own nose. Familiar streets can become labyrinthine and even in the middle of the day, it can be all too easy to become the victim of a mugging – or worse. Despite all that, there are still people who venture out. Blue collar workers who can’t afford to miss a day of work, beggars and the homeless who don’t have anywhere safe to hunker down ‘til it passes, street walkers who wouldn’t be missed even if something happened to them and, of course, tourists.

In the muffled quiet of a city that’s gone still, Jason hears the sobbing of a frightened child. He follows the sound to a park in a cul-de-sac on the fringes of Newtown where there’s a kid crouched next to a swing set.

“Hey,” Jason bridges cautiously, kneeling in front of them. “You alright there?”

The kid looks up, face streaked with tears, then starts to cry even harder.

“No, no, no,” Jason says quickly, “don’t cry, shh, it’s okay. What’s wrong?”

They hiccup. “I was playing with Eric and Fara,” They say between sobs. “And it was really nice and we were taking turns on the swings and hen there was this really big noise like BWAAAH, and then they stopped and ran away and they just left me al- _one._ ” Their voice breaks in the middle of the word.

The big noise must have been a ship’s fog horn. One had gone off about fifteen minutes back.

“Have you been alone since then?” Jason asks.

 They nod miserably.

“Where are your parents, kid?”

“Eomma’s at work and Appa had to go really really far away and ’m not a kid,” the kid protests, rubbing their face. “I’m six.”

“Six, huh? That is pretty big. Well, if you’re not a kid, then what’s your name?”

“My name’s Seungsik but you can call me Sunny if you want.” They look at him nervously, as if worried about his reaction to the Korean name.”

“Seungsik?” Jason repeats it carefully. “Is that what you prefer?”

There’s a second of surprised awe where their mouth falls open before a huge smile breaks out. “You said it right! But you’re not Korean? Do you speak Korean?”

“I can speak a little bit,” Jason grins back. “When I was around your age, I had a neighbour who was from Daegu.”

“Daegu!” Seungsik’s eyes go round. “I went to Daegu last year. Hal – my grandma lives in Daegu! We’re from Seoul though because Eomma betrayed our family when she met Appa and moved away.” The last bit is said as if it’s something they’ve heard repeatedly and often.

“Your family only exists because she did that,” Jason points out. “So maybe it’s a good thing. How long have you lived in Gotham?”

“We moved here when I was four, and I’m six now so it’s been…” They stop to count on their fingers. “Two years!”

“Wow,” Jason responds, “that’s a long time. Do you like it here?”

“Yeeees,” Seungsik says slowly. “I have a lot of friends in kindergarten and I like the river. It’s really dirty though and it’s kind of smelly.” The last part is said conspiratorially in a whisper. “Oh, and I get to play with Fara and Eric!” Possibly reminded of the friends that had left them behind, Seungsik’s eyes start to well up again.

“Is your dad still in Korea?” Jason throws out desperately, hoping that it’ll district the kid enough to prevent more waterworks.

Seungsik sniffs and shakes their head. “He’s in someplace called Yemen. He had to go there for work.”

“That _is_ far,” Jason says. “I hope he can come and meet you guys here soon. In the meantime, why don’t I get you back to your mom. What time does she normally get home?”

“Six o’clock on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and eight on Tuesday and Thursday,” Seungsik recites. “I’m supposed to wait with our neighbour until then, but Ms. Da Costa went out to get groceries and she said that I could play outside until she got back but it’s been hooooours.”

“Tell you what,” Jason says. “Why don’t we go see if she’s home now? It’s possible that she missed you in the fog.”

They think about it for a few seconds then nods. “I live over there,” Seungsik says, pointing, before frowning. “Or maybe it’s that way?”

“It’s hard to tell because of the fog, right? Do you know the street number?” Jason asks.

“Uh-huh. 1439 Devon Lane. There’s a really big tree outside that looks like it’s made out of paper.”

Jason pulls the information up then turns in a completely different direction from the ones Seungsik had indicated. “It’s this way,” he says, lips quirking up briefly.

“I knew that,” Seungsik says defensively. “I was just testing you.”

Jason leads the way through the fog, keeping careful watch of the kid out of the corner of his eye. After walking a few meters, he feels a tug on his jacket as a little hand grabs onto the edge. Seungsik takes about two and a half steps for every one that Jason takes so he slows down a little bit more.

“Is it hard,” Seungsik says, “being a hero?”

“Who said I’m a hero?” Jason responds.

“Ms. Da Costa told me that you saved her life once. And Eric showed me a picture of when you were fighting this really big mud monster, so that means that you get into a lot of fights and Eomma says that fighting is only okay if you’re helping somebody else and you don’t get into trouble for fighting which _means_ ,” here they finally take a breath, “that you’re helping other people, not just Ms. Da Costa, so that makes you a hero! Plus you’re wearing a mask thingy and you’re super nice.”

“Am I?”

“Yeah! You can say my name right and you came up and asked me if I was okay even though you don’t know me and you don’t talk to me like I’m stupid and can’t understand you and you didn’t make fun of me for crying even though boys aren’t supposed to cry –“

“Boys can cry,” Jason interrupts mildly. “Everyone cries, sometimes. It’s okay to do that, especially if you’re upset. It doesn’t matter if you’re a boy or a girl or your gender doesn’t fall into those categories, you’re allowed to cry and it’s not a bad thing if you do.”

“But Eomma said that I have to be strong, especially since Appa isn’t with us,” Seungsik frowns. “I have to be a man.”

At that, Jason stops fully and crouches down to look at the kid fully. “It’s possible,” he suggests, “that your eomma meant something different from what you think she meant. Is your eomma strong?”

“Yeah,” Seungsik says proudly, “she used to go to the gym a lot before we moved. She can lift a whole couch by herself!”

“There are different kinds of strength,” Jason says. “There’s the strength that you just talked about, physical strength, and then there’s a kind of strength that’s in here.” He taps his chest on the left side over his heart. “It’s the kind of strength where you can move away from your family because you love someone so much, the kind of strength where you can leave everything behind and start a life somewhere new, and the kind of strength to keep going and live fully even if you’re scared and lonely. It sounds to me like your eomma has that strength and that she’s hoping that you’ll have it to. You don’t need to be a man to be strong, okay? Especially if you don’t want to be a man.”

Seungsik’s eyes go wide again but they don’t say anything. Eventually, their chin shifts up and down in the tiniest of nods.

They walk the rest of the way quietly.

Ms. Da Costa turns out to be a woman in her twenty-somethings pacing on the lawn outside the apartment building. “Sunny,” she calls. “Jung Sunny, where are you?”

Jason stops by the birch tree and nudges Seungsik, who takes off running. When Da Costa sees them, she drops to her knees and wraps her arms around them in a tight hug. The kid hugs back briefly before tugging her sleeve excitedly and pointing in his direction. Da Costa’s hand flies to her mouth and she starts to stand.

He gives a short wave before turning and leaving. It only takes a few steps before he’s obscured by the fog.

Jason shoves his head into his helmet and goes looking for trouble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my no OC rule has been broken whoops. there aren't enough POC characters in comics anyways so i don't think there's much harm in adding a few more. hope you guys liked/didn't mind the addition of 'Sunny'. In the future they might go by Sun-hee but who knows ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Da Costa almost ended up dead but I've been writing this chapter in the backseat of a car/in between driving on a roadtrip for the past few days so i just wanted to wrap this piece up. sorry, guess we'll save the trauma for later. 
> 
> wait i just realized that kapoor and raya are OCs too. guess that rule was broken from ch. 1.  
> ah well


	12. Chapter Eleven

Deep into the night, the fog shows no sign of releasing its stranglehold on the city. The streets of the Bowery are desolate, flickering street lamps doing little to light the motorways. The eerie silence of the district is broken only by the muted chatter that spills out of its dingy pubs. A dog barks somewhere in the tall brush. The ninth wonder of Gotham is that the Bowery somehow manages to feel like an post-industrial small town in the middle of Gotham Harbour.

Jason hears the cruiser before he sees it; the GCPD car bursts out from the fog then barrels past and Jason watches it go with a tilted head. There haven’t been any reports or call-ins recently, and GCPD chatter has been as inane as usual. A quiet night by all standards, so where could they have been going in such a hurry?

He catches the flash of red from out of the corner of his eye and follows it to a parking lot outside a strip mall complex. Red Robin swings down to inspect a cruiser that has been left abandoned, parked diagonally across two spots. As he crouches to inspect the ground below it, the first cruiser screeches into the lot and two officers rush out. Jason considers them briefly as they move over to converse with Red Robin and then turns.

At one point, people had thought that Crown Point was the lowest the Bowery could ever sink. It’s filthy and worn, filled with the crumbling buildings and the rubble of one discarded renewal project after the other. The inhabitants are disillusioned and wary of every politician’s campaign promises to bring the area out of poverty that never seems to come to fruition.

Jason skirts around the edges of the residential blocks, heading towards the river. There, nestled amidst the shipping containers and industrial clutter, lies the wharf, the heart of Gotham’s bygone silver age. When Miller Harbour became the city’s main port, the Bowery slowly imploded on itself, folded into a depression that it was never able to escape. Now, even though many of the factories that line this part of the bay are still actively in use, there’s a suffocating air of neglect that still lingers. Jason doesn’t bother inspecting each one individually, heading towards the edge of the sprawling complexes where he can hear the ringing of gunshots.

The building is a mirror of every other on the wharf, with grey concrete walls and a low, slanting zinc roof. He slips in through a broken window on the second floor. The level is primarily office space, probably some kind of managerial area. The elevator shaft has been stripped bare, likely after disuse. He hops over the CAUTION tape and leverages himself down into the floor below. The beams running along the ceiling offer a vantage point of the assembly floor so, like many times before, he crouches down in the rafters and scans the room.

There, in the corner, stand four men. They’re heavy set, with the typical wide shoulders and burly frame that seem to be required by the job description. No visible weaponry aside from the machine guns sported by two of them and the rifle that the one talking is pointing at the MIA officers. Two of Gotham’s finest are trussed up and sweating on folding chairs in the corner.

“Tell us what we need to know and we’ll let you go,” Rifle goon snarls. Jason rolls his eyes. Sometimes, it’s as if these guys are all reading from the same melodramatic script.

“Don’t tell them shit!” One of the officers snaps, glaring at her fellow detainee.

“What the fuck does it matter, huh?” He responds. “Gordon’s gone, and Atkins will never be able to do as much good as he did. I’m not gonna stick my neck out just to save his.”

“So you’re just going to rat us out,” the female officer says, voice disbelieving. “Is that how it is? God, I knew you were a pig, Nate, but I didn’t think you were a piece of scum too.”

“It’s always the same with you guys, isn’t it?” Nate retorts, shoulders hiking up to his ears as his face turns red. “Doesn’t matter how long I’ve been your partner, just because I wasn’t here for No Man’s Land, all of a sudden, I’m not a true Gothamite, or what fucking ever. Well I’m sick of it, okay? And I’m sick of you trying to pretend that this city isn’t going to pieces, like it hasn’t been going to pieces for the past fucking thirty years. I’m fucking tired of being a target just because some wacko dressed up in an out of season Halloween costume and his goons want to prove a point to fuck knows who, as if Fields wasn’t bad enough –“

At this, one of the aforementioned goons coughs. “Hey, hey, hey,” he says, jabbing the rifle against Nate’s chest. “I think that’s enough out of you.”

Nate, surprisingly enough, shuts up.

“Look,” rifle goon says, “we don’t want to be caught up in this either. So just fucking tell us what you wanted with the boss and we’ll be on our way. We’ll only shoot you twice even. It’ll be quick, just ‘pop, pop’.” He taps the nozzle of the rifle against Nate’s head twice demonstratively.

“You won’t feel anything,” Machine Gun goon #1 adds helpfully. “’Cause you’ll be dead.”

“Think that’s the point, Rick,” a third Goon grunt. He shifts, and Jason moves closer to see – yeah, he’s got a pistol strapped to his left leg.

The last goon, the other one with the machine gun, stays silent, gaze heavy on the two captives.

“We don’t even know who your boss is!” Nate says, with no small amount of hysteria. “Romy just wanted to follow up on a lead for the –“

“Oh, yeah?” Lefftie says. “So why were you two officers stopping right in the middle of that particular car lot, huh? Don’t think you got any calls about illegal parking.”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Romy grinds out.

As fascinating as the banter is, Jason doesn’t have the time to waste waiting for them to finish the back-and-forth. He draws his gun quietly and levels it at the second goon with the machine gun. Breathes in, out. Squeezes. The man lets out a gasp and falls backwards, eyes unseeing. The other three whirl around with what would be a fairly impressive reaction time if Jason hadn’t already flattened himself back down. They fan out, guns ready, looking around warily. The officers shift uneasily, but he’s pretty sure that the movement is meant to disguise their efforts to untie themselves.

Jason slides the barrel of his gun around and aims carefully. Two shots and Leftie crumples. Rick shoots at the ceiling with no particularly skilled aim, shells clattering to the floor as he swings the machine gun wildly.

“You even know how to use that thing?” Jason remarks under his breath, rolling his eyes. He waits for a pause in the spray then drops off the beam to land quietly behind a control station for the assembly line. A few seconds later, a line of bullets drill through the wall to his right. Jason moves over to the other side of the station, ducking past a rusted claw machine looking piece of equipment. He counts three seconds, looks out, then squeezes – Rick goes down too, blood already beginning to pool on the factory floor beneath the three bodies.

Rifle goon looks ashen, stumbling closer to the two hostages. “Don’t come any closer or I’ll shoot!” His voice waverers, his earlier bravado completely gone.

Jason scoots his back against the cool metal of the equipment. “Do you honestly think I give a rat’s ass about GCPD officers?” he calls, voice amused, as he reloads.

That throws him for a loop. “You’re one of them vigilantes, aren’t you?” Rifle goon stammers. “Batman’s group.”

“Batman doesn’t kill,” Jason snorts. “You won’t find the same kind of leniency here.” The sound isn’t quite the pop that they’d said it would be, but it’s just as quick.

Jason strolls out from his cover, noting that Leftie is still hanging on. The man’s eyes are wide, tears pooling at the corners as he takes short, hiccoughing breaths. He jackknifes when Jason prods him with the toe of his boot, back arching away from the ground then falling back limply with a high-pitched whine. Jason hums a little to himself as he brings the barrel of his gun –

“Wait!”

It’s Romy, not Nate, that’s the source of the outburst. The officers are now standing free, rubbing their wrists. Jason turns to them with a twist to his lips and his arms spread. “What,” he asks, only vaguely annoyed.

“You’re the Red Hood, right?”

Jason eyes her cautiously but shifts his helmet into a nod, not sure where she’s going with the question.

“Let us take him into custody,” she demands, raising her chin a little to look at him properly. “There’s no one with any claim over the Bowery – or at least, there shouldn’t be. If there’s someone new trying to make this their territory, that’s GCPD business.”

“Are you crazy, Romy?” her partner asks. “We don’t negotiate with these guys.”

“I’m a little tired of hearing your voice, Nate,” Jason says flatly.

Nate splutters, face red.

“Look, officer.” He spares the man a glance. “Officers. I don’t fucking care. You want this low-life breathing, you can take care of him yourselves. If you ask me, it would be more merciful to let him die.”

They look at the goon lying in a puddle of blood and piss and all the other fun things that leak out of dead bodies.

He lets himself out while they’re distracted.

His phone – the one he actually uses not just one of his burners – buzzes as he’s heading away from the port. He pulls his helmet off, glancing to the side as a red cape glides past, and dials the number back.

“’Yello,” he says.

“Jason,” Talia greets. “Is this a good time?”

“Yeah,” he says, and turns away. “I can talk.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for the encouragement! i am,,, dealing with things haha. i did some editing because for some reason i didn't see chapter nine?? what's up with that


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